Massive Fanfic Site Archive of Our Own Says It’s Going Down for 'Up to 4 Weeks'

Archive of Our Own (AO3), a massive repository for fanfiction and creative writing, might be down for as long as a month after going down for "maintenance" on Thursday. The Organization for Transformative Works (OTW), the non-profit organization that runs AO3, posted on its status page early Thursday morning that the site was down for maintenance. A few hours later, it updated the status to say that it was expected to take at least 12 hours. By Thursday afternoon, it said the site restoration will take around two weeks, but could take up to a month. “We are hopeful that we will be able to bring the site back up in a degraded state sooner. If that does happen, there may be times when the site has to be brought down temporarily until this is fully resolved. Please stay tuned for further info,” OTW wrote. A spokesperson for OTW told 404 Media Thursday night that there are no more updates at this time beyond what's on the status page. They did, however, say that they don't expect there to be data loss. Early Friday morning, OTW added an update to the status page: "First, no AO3 data has been deleted. All your works, bookmarks, kudos, etc., are safe," it says. "Second, while we currently don't believe that the user database was stolen, we are also unable to rule it out. The AO3 database contains account information that may include your username, email address, IP address, and a hashed version of your password." They say they use hashing techniques to protect password data, but recommend users change their passwords on any other sites where they use the same password as on AO3, as a precaution. It’s difficult to overstate the importance of AO3 to fan culture, fanfiction writers and readers, and its influence on internet culture in general. As of September, the open-source fanfic repository hosted over 18.4 million works spanning over 82,900 fandoms. This status update means AO3 is expected to be down during much of hoa hoa hoa season , most of ACOTAR new book release week, and on the cusp of the month formerly known as NaNoWriMo . If you were going as Ebony Dark'ness Dementia Raven Way for Halloween , you are in our thoughts. And if you have something to share about AO3’s extended shutdown and how it will affect the fanfic community, I'd love to hear from you: sam@404media.co. Updated to add OTW comment and Friday morning's status page update.